Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure is a brand-new life sim, a genre that is somewhat erroneously established as relaxing and stress-free. While mostly cute, the constant need for resources and the countless options for expanding your farm are often overwhelming for players who want to see it all. Now that this is off my chest, I can say that this game is charming and potentially enjoyable in cooperative mode, but some odd design decisions and other issues prevent it from becoming a contender in the genre.
Four Friends in Need
The start of Ikonei Island isn’t the most thrilling, as your party of four disembarks on the island. The weather conditions are harsh, the nightly colors on the dull side, and exploration is severely limited by boundaries that you will have to learn to deal with. It’s not the greatest first impression, but thankfully things improve in a while as you reach your first milestone and the day finally breaks.
Under the bright sun, the island looks a lot more welcoming and radiant. The vivid daytime colors and fine graphics catch the eye, trails left on tall grass by your character, in a beautiful effect. The protagonists are cute and their appearances varied enough, with the pets adding to the diversity of the inhabitants. It’s refreshing to see a life sim that goes for full-blown modern visuals instead of relying on the retro style that is present in recent releases such as Spirittea and Necesse that, despite their accomplishments, are starting to feel a little tired.
Cute graphics aside, the gameplay loop brings no real surprises, as you explore the island in search of countless resources. Divided in fairly small areas that lock your progress beyond shrines, animals, or other features, Ikonei Island is going from enclosed locations to a considerable open world, luckily with some fast travel points to activate. The issue is that the more you open new locations, the more it becomes demanding, with resources spreading thin and requiring frequent expeditions to your camp’s storage, as the inventory upgrade isn’t immediately accessible and not the definite solution to this evil.
What started easy becomes daunting, you get quests that you aren’t really instructed on how to perform, the advisor frogs that give you gameplay tips frequently do so a long time after you have discovered how this or that mechanic works at your own expense, and there’s this general sense of imbalance and misdirection. Sometimes you stumble upon the way to unlock a new area or discover a new resource almost by accident, and as the island opens up and your head begins wondering what to do next, a feeling of frustration sets in. Where is this animal that I need? What kind of food does it like? How can I craft the seeds to plant that food? Where is the resource I lack to unlock this new house or room? It’s too much information to digest in a few hours of playing, and not quite my personal definition of relaxing.
Animals Are Our Friends
As you explore the island you are going to find many animals who may be friendly or aggressive. You can tame some of these if you use the right approach of moving slowly and feeding them, making a friend for life that will follow you around when summoned. But they have needs and that is quite an understatement – their happiness meter sinks faster than a hot knife in butter. To make matters worse, for some reason there’s no pause button for the single player mode, so if you decide to take a quick break you are sure to return to companions holding a grudge.
When the animals are sulking, you can’t use their unique abilities or possess them, something that is often useful and sometimes vital for progression. Take the Longhorn as an example, a boar-like creature that rams into things to open pathways or to collect resources from ore mines and other rock piles. When it is in a bad mood, there’s no way to command it, so you have to resort to a very limited assortment of actions per in-game day, from petting to listening, washing and feeding. Animals also level up and become more efficient, besides changing their looks, and you have all the interest in doing this, but the process is cumbersome as they are frequently disgruntled.
Possessing an animal is the best way to use them, going straight to the actions that we want to instead of waiting for them to decide if they should obey us or not. It’s a nice touch, but the affinity mechanic powering this is as unfriendly as it can be.
Playing solo certainly isn’t as fun as doing it with up to three friends, and yet the whole gang is on the island. Switching between them is easy, but managing four characters by yourself is quite a task, especially considering that their inventories aren’t shared. This means that if you want to use another character for something, you will get an empty inventory and must once again craft the basic tools and find the elementary resources to do anything. It doesn’t leave many room for imagination; select a main character and leave the others standing still near your farm, doing other tasks that involve plants and things like that.
This could have been much better if your team showed any sign of intelligence to perform basic tasks, such as collecting resources or tending to farming duties without micromanagement, but it isn’t so; we have a solo mode where three characters are simply idle, waiting for you to control them.
As a four-player cooperative adventure, Ikonei Island performs a lot better and is somewhat generous in this regard. If one player owns the game, the other three can join and play indefinitely, no need to purchase additional copies.
They Dream of Paradise
The loop of gathering, crafting, and exploring is here but somewhat all over the place, the solo mode feels like an afterthought, and the animal companions are a little on the annoying side, instead of being a joy to keep around. Things look a lot better playing with a few friends, but most fans of the genre might end up playing alone and the enjoyment level is far from being the same. Furthermore, there are a few bugs that hurt the experience, including resources appearing on top of rocks that you can’t reach at all.
Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure has its heart in the right place but the execution isn’t quite there. This isn’t an island made for relaxation, but one where some frustrations arise regularly as you explore the regions. Hopping between harmless fun and frustrating exploration, this is a game that deserves a look, but it could have been a much more epic journey.
Score: 7.5/10
Pros:
- Very charming looks
- A gameplay loop that somewhat works, especially in cooperative mode
- One player owns the game, three more play for free
Cons:
- Some misdirection in terms of world exploration
- Animal companions are grumpier than Grinch
- Solo mode lacks AI companions
- Occasional bugs
Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
